Stop in the Desert. The End of a Beautiful Era

The poetic collections of Joseph Brodsky "Stop in the Desert", "The End of a Beautiful Era", "Part of Speech", "New Stanzas to Augusta", "Urania" and "Landscape with Flooding" remained inaccessible to Russian readers for a long time, except for "samizdat". In the 1970s-1990s, these books were published by the American publishing house "Ardis". Brodsky gratefully wrote about how Karl Proffer, one of the founders of "Ardis", managed to preserve the continuity of the development of Russian literature and its high significance, saving many Russian writers and poets from oblivion.
The collection "Stop in the Desert" was compiled by the author in Russia. It includes poems from the 1960s ("Christmas Romance", "A Large Elegy to John Donne", "To A. A. Akhmatova", "In the Village, God Does Not Live in Corners", the poem "Gorbunov and Gorchakov", and other works). Initially published in 1970 by the Chekhov publishing house, in 1988 "Ardis" released a reprint.
The collection "The End of a Beautiful Era", first published in 1977, includes poems from 1964-1971 written by Brodsky before his departure from the Soviet Union. Among them are well-known works such as "A Speech about Spilled Milk", "Dedicated to Yalta", "A Conversation with a Celestial Being", "Lithuanian Divertissement", and others.